ANTH 351 - Language and Expressive Culture

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

This seminar provides the advanced student with an intensive investigation of theoretical and practical problems in specific areas of research that relate language and linguistics to expressive activity. Although emphasizing linguistic modes of analysis and argumentation, the course is situated at the intersection of important intellectual crosscurrents in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that focus on how culture is produced and projected through not only verbal, but also musical, material, kinaesthetic, and dramatic arts. Each topic culminates in independent research projects.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2015/16b: Anthropology of New Media. This seminar explores the assemblages of technologies, forms of mass-mediation, subjectivities, and networked sociabilities that, in the current moment, allow us to imagine that we inhabit a social world that is mediated in radically new ways. Our impulse in this seminar will not be to look for the kernel that holds all new media together as “new” or even as “media,” although we will pay close attention to scholars who make such arguments. Instead, we develop a set of theoretical tools that will make sense of a variety of features that oftentimes characterizes these assemblages: the forms of mediation they make possible, their virtuality, the fictional and historical imaginations that they presuppose and sustain, the forms of playfulness and kinds of signs that often comprise them, and the subjectivities, social relations, networks, and vulnerabilities that are often a part of them. Mr. Smith.

Prerequisite: ANTH 150 , ANTH 250 or permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.